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Turning the Desire into a killer music phone?

slugger09

Well-Known Member
Jul 20, 2010
185
4
Northern Ireland
Have you any tips/advice? Music is the main thing I use a phone for but so far the Desire seems very lacking.

We'll start of with actually putting music on the phone, as an ex iPhone owner iTunes was a breeze, organise the music the way you want then just sync, simples, With the Desire however its just not that simple, you create a folder called music and just copy all over, simple in itself, the issue however is there is no organisation, everything is through each other, just thrown on there so finding anything is a nightmare. Sure there is the likes of Doubletwist but these programs make iTunes look speedy, its SSSSSLLLLLLLOOOOWWWW painfully slow. There has to be an easier way surly?

Then there is Podcasts, On my Nokia X6 I go to podcasts, download what I want and like most phones the podcast goes into a podcast folder in the music player, nice and simple, not so on the HTC Desire, you have to get a podcast app, then you have to start entering long xml addresses and its just a major pain, again I'm sure i'm missing something

So any advice is very much welcome.
 
Google ' Itunes sync' on a pc and download it, its a free simple program that is one click sync when you mount the desire in usb mode. You can even choose to keep stuff on the phone you don't have on your pc anymore and it does playlists. For a better music player download 3d (cubed) or mixzing - hope it helps!
 
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Why do people like iTunes...?...Its horrendous!!

It takes me about 10 times longer to get music onto my ipod than the simple 10 second 'drag & drop' on the HTC.

+1 for this....

iTunes is ok................... If you have a mac.

For windows users it's like a slow torture, but it was the only way I could get music onto my touch. I swapped to Media Monkey because I didnt like iTunes auto sync where if you got anything wrong or hooked up to a different pc it would quite happily start emptying your iPod and got fed up of it trying to get me to install Safari and MobileMe every couple of days (after declining and hiding).

I personally like to be able to manage and organise my own music (by album not artist) so a good piece of software and good tags is my preferred method with drag and drop what I want.
 
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I too am huge into my music. When Im on foot im plugged in where ever I go. But I don't use my phone as my music player thou (I know this doesnt help you out with your issues) I use my Cowon S9 for all my audio. One, because I don't want to use up the phones battery power and two, there will never be a phone that will ever sound as good as the Cowon S9.
My Cowon even has the Android home page :)
 
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problems with music tags, etc, are generally because you have been using itunes to manage your music. it is terrible, i'm sure it does this to make sure you never leave. ie, make things as hard as possible to use anything else by messing up tags and organisation.

boooo, never used the evil thing even when i had an ipod.

btw, no one, no one can beat my phone with regards to music, spotify is a killer app.
 
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I use an app called 'mp3 cover fetcher' to grab missing cover art and embed it as part of the mp3 tag.

'mixzing' is the best music app I have found on android and in combination with 'last.fm' and 'scrobble droid' and 'ringtone music mp3 finder', my desire is an excellent media player.

use widget locker as well and you can put playback controls for mixzing and last.fm on the lockscreen.

itag is great for editing mp3 tag info and finding missing cover art, you can preview the mp3s, see cover art and all tag info and edit it all on the phone, quickly and easily.
 
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I use Mspot. I was sceptical at first with it being cloud based but it works really well, plus it doesn't hog up all of your storage. Its only a basic player without an EQ but sounds good on my Sony BT headphones so I don't really miss an EQ.
Some of the tagging is messed up but this is due to the way I tagged it an not the player.

I'm also looking forward to see what Google music offers :)
 
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+1 for this....

I'll see your +1, and raise you a +5.

I've used/had iTunes for years for my old iPod, and I STILL cant get my head around it.

Nothing is easier than setting your Desire to be a Hard Drive via USB, and dragging your music from your PC to the phone.

Piece of piss.

iTunes, and all Apple products are the work of Satan.
 
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I use MP3Tag to tag my files. I just drag and drop music to the microSD and the music app reads the tags and organises music into artist, album, genre etc. with album art: -

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It couldn't be much easier. It's only hard work if your files aren't tagged correctly.

I've got a pair of Sony DR-BT101 Bluetooth headphones and I can skip tracks, change the volume etc. using the controls on the headphones without having to take my phone out of my pocket.
 
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I'll admit I am not an iTunes fan but it does have its strong points, I find it easier to create playlists etc on the PC rather than faffing around on the phone, I mean just create the playlist on iTunes, drag the song to that playlist hit sync and away you go, Same with podcast, just search subscribe and sync and bobs your uncle and if your missing art work just right click and find artwork and thats it. I have a Nokia X6 aswell and Ovi music is also very good at this, anything I have tried for the HTC has been dog slow or just to awkward
 
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Is this the stock music player that you are using?

I use MP3Tag to tag my files. I just drag and drop music to the microSD and the music app reads the tags and organises music into artist, album, genre etc. with album art: -

devicet.png


device2.png


device3e.png


device4.png


It couldn't be much easier. It's only hard work if your files aren't tagged correctly.

I've got a pair of Sony DR-BT101 Bluetooth headphones and I can skip tracks, change the volume etc. using the controls on the headphones without having to take my phone out of my pocket.
 
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+1 for MediaMonkey. Not only is it good for organising and tagging your collection...if you setup a sync profile (takes about 20 seconds) for the Desire...you can right click songs/albums/playlists and it will sync directly to the phone, into the folder of your choice with the structure of your choice. I use /MP3/Artist - Album/Track personally..this makes it easy to browse manually if I need to.

You can even set it up to automatically sync whatever you want.

I swear by it and in the spirit of Android...MediaMonkey is massively configurable.

I have attached my MM Config screen to show you..in case you are interested :D
 

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+1 for Media Monkey. It's good.

But if you do really like itunes just do what I used to do.
Keep using itunes, and then just use official HTC Sync program to copy the files across to the phone. It allows you to choose itunes playlists and so on, and organises all files into artists, genres etc. Plus, you can do all the tagging stuff in itunes as before.
 
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I simply threw in a big (32GB) sd card and with the phone connected to the PC manually dragged and dropped the music files and/or imported cds across, and renamed the folders manually where necessary. Not pretty, but it worked.

Recovering stuff foolishly embedded for my sins in a past life into itunes was a little more complicated, and needed the 'show hidden files' trick to reveal where the stuff is lurking on the ipod device itself. You can then again drag stuff across to the Desire and although the file names look as though they have gone haywire the tags still seemed in my case to be there and the phone was able to recognise songs, artists and albums correctly. So far so good...
 
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